There's Got to Be a Better Way

You have probably heard by now about campaigns to stop using plastic straws, and efforts to ditch plastic bottles of water in favor of reusable bottles. Have you ever considered how pervasive single-use plastics are in our daily life? On a simple walk down the street or along the Greenway trail one will almost always encounter a piece of plastic trash that has not been disposed of properly.

We have packs of gum wrapped in plastic. Plastic peanut butter jars. Electronic gadgets in oversized plastic clamshells. Plastic bags at the grocery store. The ubiquitous plastic beverage bottles. Have you tried grocery shopping without purchasing something made of or packaged in plastic?

There are things we can do as consumers: limit our use of disposable, single-use cups and utensils when we eat out, bring reusable bags when we shop (for general groceries as well as produce). Skip the straw, or bring your own reusable straw.

But those are of limited scope and effectiveness. What about the companies that continue to manufacture and use plastic for every item they sell? It is a great material: sturdy, inexpensive. But as we are coming to learn, recycling facilities are inadequate and sometimes no longer cost-effective. These companies are reaping the benefits of cheap plastic while offloading the costs to cities and taxpayers to dispose of or recycle the materials.

What if the costs to recycle plastic had to be included in the sale price of an item—if an industry had to include the costs to recycle or otherwise safely dispose of all the materials in the item? That $4.99 jar of peanut butter ends up on your curb, collected and sorted and (hopefully) shipped off to a facility when it is cleaned and recycled into something else. All those costs are currently not included in the price of the peanut butter but rather paid using municipal funds collected from citizens as taxes and fees.

In a well-ordered system, collecting, sorting, and recycling would not be entirely on municipalities to handle, but on the industries that profit from manufacturing and selling these items. How quickly do you think companies would switch to biodegradable materials in lieu of non-degradable plastics?

That doesn’t leave us off the hook as consumers. Imagine if you had to dispose of all your trash and recycling on your own property. Could you? How would your buying habits change if all those plastic bags and peanut butter jars ended up in your backyard?

Well—they do. Maybe not your immediate backyard, but they have to go somewhere. Some pieces escape and end up on roadsides or places like the Greenway, or floating downriver; the rest ends up at a landfill or recycling facility. In our finite world, we all have to take responsibility for stewardship of our home.

The choices we make have an effect. Encourage elected officials to make changes that internalize the costs of doing business back to the industries that profit instead of externalizing them to taxpayers. And of course, skip the straw and bring your own bags to the grocery store.


Disclaimer: This is not a sanctimonious post, as I am 100% guilty of wasteful buying, with a particular attachment to fast food and its related wrappings. I'm trying to do better.

The Birds and the Bees and the...Aphids?

Abundant generations!

We all know (generally) how baby animals are made: the male and female encounter one another, some mode of intercourse is engaged (enthusiastic, coerced, or otherwise), and after some period of time the female gives birth or lays eggs to begin the next generation.

Aphids--those abundant garden pests--have a rather more complex series of strategies. Who knew? And their abundance is in part due to their unique method of reproduction.

Aphids will generally overwinter as eggs. In the spring, the eggs hatch into a generation that is entirely female. These females (fundatrices) will, without having mated, give birth to other females that are essentially genetic clones of herself. And she gives birth to live babies, not eggs! No need to faff about with finding a mate, cooking some babies and laying eggs--female aphids can be already developing their own babies before being born themselves.

The first generation of females born are wingless. Individuals in later generations may or may not have wings; since the wingless individuals are not able to move from plant to plant easily the winged versions help to disperse and carry on the population as the original host plants become crowded.

Winged females in the upper left

As the summer passes into fall, the females begin to produce both male and female offspring. The males again are nearly genetic clones of their mother but missing a single chromosome, which flips the switch and produces a male clone instead of a female. This generation will (finally) mate and these females will lay the eggs that will survive the winter and begin the cycle again the following year.

Patterns and Serendipity

Common Milkweed with variegated leaves

Summer on the Greenway is such a fast-moving, blink-and-you-may-miss-it extravaganza of life. Every week there are new flowers blooming and new sounds to be heard, from dickcissels returning from their winter homes to the south, to katydids chirring in the grass and cicadas buzzing up in the trees.

There are predictable patterns to the progression, with Wild Quinine flowering before the Purple Coneflower, which flowers before Gray-headed Coneflower, Tall Coreopsis, and so forth. When I noticed the finely-frilled Illinois Bundleflower leaves near the Birds in Flight,  I backtracked to where a patch of Partridge Pea normally grows to see if it had also made an appearance (it had, though small enough that I had overlooked its low sprouts when I first passed).

Illinois Bundleflower

Although the general sweep of the season is predictable, it is spiced with the seemingly arbitrary daily occurrences one encounters. Why is this Wild Quinine plant swarming with flies, beetles, bees and ants when the next dozen along the trail are completely devoid of insect life? What in the world caused the variegation on that Milkweed's leaves? Why is one morning filled with birdsong when the next is silent? Are those Asters--in June?! Sometimes answers can be found with additional research or observation. Sometimes they remain mysteries.

Partridge Pea

What fun would it be walking a trail day after day, week after week, if everything was always as  expected? For every time I encounter a tiny baby snapping turtle crossing the trail, there are twenty trips where I see no herps at all. I may know that I am more likely to see them in overcast, drizzly conditions, but there are no guarantees. Same goes for butterflies, birds, bees--I can try to time my jaunts for when I may see whatever my target is at the moment, but I regularly come away empty-handed (if one can consider a couple hours walking out in the world empty-handed).

The world is full of patterns and surprises. Just another reason to get outside and enjoy it as the seasons go by.

June Asters